Some Thoughts About Tracking Shot 1

by Pete Brooks

We are all the children of Baudrillard , most of us admittedly by way of the Matrix, and so this piece began as a meditation on the relationship between real experience and fiction, between memory and the moment, on what is the status of the past. What does the past mean? where does it go? that kind of thing. Making a piece like this you are trying to find simple metaphors to express complex thoughts and so we began with the idea of an actress taking us on a journey through her life, a life which is a mixture of memories of events both real and fictional that late in her life and dying of cancer she has trouble distinguishing between. Or maybe she no longer feel the distinction is important. In memory everything achieves a kind of equality. A memory of a dream or film is no less real than a memory of a real event. Anyway this actress needs a reason to take us on the journey, she needs to show us something or do something. She's dying so this suggests its something she needs to do before she dies something she needs to put right.

So we came up with the idea that she wants to change the ending of a film she made thirty years before so that it becomes a declaration of love for a man she loved but who died before she ever told him. We like this idea because it is so patently pointless and yet at the same time so poignant. It reminds me of an episode of Holby city in which a distraught father, whose wife and daughter have both been killed in a car crash asks that they be put together in the same mortuary drawer, because the child was afraid of the dark. The doctors say they can't its against the rules and anyway it makes no difference. But we know it does. Pointless gestures are not without meaning.